#murderbotdiaries — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #murderbotdiaries, aggregated by home.social.
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I have just finished Murderbot #8
IT WAS TOO SHORT!!! :((Not that the plot would have supported much more, but thats not the point. Morrrrrrre :) )
#iamreading #murderbot #MurderBotDiaries #SciFi #sciencefiction
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I have just finished Murderbot #8
IT WAS TOO SHORT!!! :((Not that the plot would have supported much more, but thats not the point. Morrrrrrre :) )
#iamreading #murderbot #MurderBotDiaries #SciFi #sciencefiction
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Platform Decay (Murderbot Diaries #8) by Martha Wells (audiobook)
One of the quirks of the XigXag audiobook platform is that once you’re on the £5.99 tier, it is often the cheapest place to buy a new book. The Murderbot series of novellas is always expensive. One does not begrudge the author her success, but charging £19 for a 256-page hardback (it’s not out in paperback yet) or £10 for the Kindle edition is the publisher taking the piss.
So: £5.99 is was, for the audiobook, narrated by Kevin R. Free, which sounds like a made up name. Do note that some of the Murderbot series is now available with a full-cast recording, but this early edition of the latest episode is not one of those.
I said latest episode there, and that’s how to think about Murderbot Diaries. I’ve said before that it’s like episodic TV, or a science fiction soap opera. Ironically, I had complaints about the TV series based on these books because the episodes were too short, often seeming to be arbitrarily chunked out rather than feeling distinct. In the case of the books, there has been a long old wait between outings. I reviewed System Collapse in January 2024 and it now appears to be June 2026.
Let’s not be one of those demanding whiny readers, like those who badger Mr Martin or Mr Lewisohn. Let us instead be grateful that there is more Murderbot.
This episode acknowledges the climactic events of System Collapse, but also stands alone as a straightforward adventure. Most of the human characters we’ve met before are offscreen, as it were, and though there is continuity there is a clear shape to this, and the ending doesn’t feel like a cliffhanger.
Murderbot is on a mission to extract some relatives of Dr Mensah from a giant ringworld-like torus that encircles a planet. There are many different zones/habitats in the Torus, and a variety of different corporate entities and polities, some of them hostile.
The novella begins as our narrator enters (with assistance from Three, the SecUnit he liberated in the previous book) and takes us step by step through the extraction and all the difficulties. It’s a computer game level, in effect. Get in, get these people, get out, while your corporate enemies try to stop you. There are of course complications and side quests, but that’s essentially it. And, like the other books, the whole thing is narrated with the mordant humour of someone who doesn’t want to meet new humans and certainly not children, yuk.
On one level this is very much the kind of contemporary science fiction that involves the main character / first person narrator interrogating every feeling, thought, and decision to the point of madness. It’s the kind of thing that has put me off reading contemporary science fiction, and why I threw down the last Becky Chambers novel I tried to read and never went back. This kind of thing has to be handled very, very well for it to work, and we wouldn’t be here (at #8 in the series) if it didn’t. In fact, one suspects a little playful pisstaking of the whole sub-genre, because Murderbot has a new module installed that allows him to check on the pesky emotions thrown up by his organic components.
Anyway, this was entertaining and amusing, as ever, and the audiobook narrator does a decent job. It comes in at 5 hours and 45 minutes, which is about half the length of a regular audiobook—but even XigXag’s full price of £7.99 is the cheapest way to get hold of it.
#bookReview #Books #MarthaWells #Murderbot #MurderbotDiaries #reviews #ScienceFiction #SF -
Platform Decay (Murderbot Diaries #8) by Martha Wells (audiobook)
One of the quirks of the XigXag audiobook platform is that once you’re on the £5.99 tier, it is often the cheapest place to buy a new book. The Murderbot series of novellas is always expensive. One does not begrudge the author her success, but charging £19 for a 256-page hardback (it’s not out in paperback yet) or £10 for the Kindle edition is the publisher taking the piss.
So: £5.99 is was, for the audiobook, narrated by Kevin R. Free, which sounds like a made up name. Do note that some of the Murderbot series is now available with a full-cast recording, but this early edition of the latest episode is not one of those.
I said latest episode there, and that’s how to think about Murderbot Diaries. I’ve said before that it’s like episodic TV, or a science fiction soap opera. Ironically, I had complaints about the TV series based on these books because the episodes were too short, often seeming to be arbitrarily chunked out rather than working as episodes. In the case of the books, there has been a long old wait between episodes. I reviewed System Collapse in January 2024 and it now appears to be June 2026.
Let’s not be one of those demanding whiny readers, like those who badger Mr Martin or Mr Lewisohn. Let us instead be grateful that there is more Murderbot.
This episode acknowledges the climactic events of System Collapse, but also stands alone as a straightforward adventure. Most of the human characters we’ve met before are offscreen, as it were, and though there is continuity there is a clear shape to this, and the ending doesn’t feel like a cliffhanger.
Murderbot is on a mission to extract some relatives of Dr Mensah from a giant ringworld-like torus that encircles a planet. There are many different zones/habitats in the Torus, and a variety of different corporate entities and polities, some of them hostile.
The novella begins as our narrator enters (with assistance from Three, the SecUnit he liberated in the previous book) and takes us step by step through the extraction and all the difficulties. It’s a computer game level, in effect. Get in, get these people, get out, while your corporate enemies try to stop you. There are of course complications and side quests, but that’s essentially it. And, like the other books, the whole thing is narrated with the mordant humour of someone who doesn’t want to meet new humans and certainly not children, yuk.
On one level this is very much the kind of contemporary science fiction that involves the main character / first person narrator interrogating every feeling, thought, and decision to the point of madness. It’s the kind of thing that has put me off reading contemporary science fiction, and why I threw down the last Becky Chambers novel I tried to read and never went back. This kind of thing has to be handled very, very well for it to work, and we wouldn’t be here (at #8 in the series) if it didn’t. In fact, one suspects a little playful pisstaking of the whole sub-genre, because Murderbot has a new module installed that allows him to check on the pesky emotions thrown up by his organic components.
Anyway, this was entertaining and amusing, as ever, and the audiobook narrator does a decent job. It comes in at 5 hours and 45 minutes, which is about half the length of a regular audiobook—but even XigXag’s full price of £7.99 is the cheapest way to get hold of it.
#bookReview #Books #MarthaWells #Murderbot #MurderbotDiaries #reviews #ScienceFiction #SF -
Hehe, just noticed a reference to the Books of the Raksura in System Collapse, the seventh book in the Murderbot Diaries (by the same author, Martha Wells)
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Hehe, just noticed a reference to the Books of the Raksura in System Collapse, the seventh book in the Murderbot Diaries (by the same author, Martha Wells)
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As I loaded Platform Decay on my ebook reader and the cover page displayed, my excitement rating spiked at 98.7%.
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As I loaded Platform Decay on my ebook reader and the cover page displayed, my excitement rating spiked at 98.7%.
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Spending the weekend with the newest Murderbot #bookstodon #MurderBotDiaries
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Spending the weekend with the newest Murderbot #bookstodon #MurderBotDiaries
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@ellecordova sorry, can't partake in that since I'm in the middle of #murderbotdiaries 😀
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@ellecordova sorry, can't partake in that since I'm in the middle of #murderbotdiaries 😀
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@arielkroon I can't be particularly specific, but the #MurderbotDiaries community on Tumblr is quite active, often in terms of analysis.
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@arielkroon I can't be particularly specific, but the #MurderbotDiaries community on Tumblr is quite active, often in terms of analysis.
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Anyone got any links to good #murderbotDiaries thinkpieces? And not based on the show either - I haven't watched it yet. Just basic literary analysis.
I can go searching but reccs tend to be much much preferable to internet search results these days.
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Anyone got any links to good #murderbotDiaries thinkpieces? And not based on the show either - I haven't watched it yet. Just basic literary analysis.
I can go searching but reccs tend to be much much preferable to internet search results these days.
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Decided to start doing bad doodles of my favourite scenes from various media.
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Decided to start doing bad doodles of my favourite scenes from various media.
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@JessTheUnstill evergreen toot 🙃
(if you haven’t read / listened to the #MurderbotDiaries yet I can recommend it as highly relatable) -
@JessTheUnstill evergreen toot 🙃
(if you haven’t read / listened to the #MurderbotDiaries yet I can recommend it as highly relatable) -
I love Murderbot!
Yeah the TV show helmet design is cool, so I've decided to make it as an alt cover for the book.
#murderbotdiaries #murderbot #Inkscape #graphicdesign -
I love Murderbot!
Yeah the TV show helmet design is cool, so I've decided to make it as an alt cover for the book.
#murderbotdiaries #murderbot #Inkscape #graphicdesign -
“Possibly I was overthinking this? I do that. It’s the anxiety that comes with being a part organic murderbot. The upside was paranoid attention to detail. The downside was also paranoid attention to detail.”
- Murderbot, Exit Strategy chapter 1
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New blog post: Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells (Murderbot Diaries book 3) https://roytang.net/2025/12/rogue-protocol/
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New blog post: Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells (Murderbot Diaries book 3) https://roytang.net/2025/12/rogue-protocol/
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„I didn’t know how non-neurotypical I was until Murderbot.
„Martha Wells talks to Sophie Bushwick about how she came up with the idea for the series, how it was originally intended just to be a short story, and how writing about how Murderbot processes emotions led to a revelation of her own.“
video with 22 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ0wIHRXq0Y -
Alexander Skarsgård talking about the series Murderbot in this short interview (5 min). He also got asked what his personal "Sanctuary Moon" series is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfliy-iFUjs -
If you are a fan of Murderbot, either the TV series or the books by Martha Wells or both, feel free to write something about it on Mondays using the hashtag. You can also share #fanart or #fanfiction or memes etc.
If you are not interested in this, please mute the hashtag(s).
I'll do a separate post for this today.
